A long journey in Silicon Valley

$19 Billion Gets You All of It

Gets you what? $19 billion is the market capitalization of 10 of the major U.S. newspaper stocks. Put another way, about 1/8th the value of Google.

To be clear, this is not the valuation of the top 10 newspaper companies because Hearst, Tribune, Cox are private and Dow Jones is part of behemoth News Corp, but it does make a stark statement about the wisdom of being public ownership of media stocks. There are calls for private equity to jump in and pick up cheap newspaper stocks but I don’t see that happening because 1) The Sam Zell Experience, 2) organized labor is a hazard on the print side of newspaper operations and threatens the online side as well, and 3) we’re dealing with some fundamentally broken businesses who’s salvation is not going to be found in cost cutting and reorganizations.